Tag: callwithus

Here is a php script designed to download the callwithus.com rate file and create a rate card in a2billing from it. It’s designed to work with the latest version of A2Billing – version 1.4.1 Here is a link to the script – http://sysadminman.net/misc/cwu-rates.html If you copy and paste the script in to a file on your A2Billing server called /tmp/cwu-rates.php you can then run it by doing – cd /tmp php cwu-rates.php Before running it you will need to set the correct dabase, user and password name for a2billing at the top of the script. Also, the default markup for…

Using a callwithus DID with FreePBX/Asterisk is very straight forward. First you need to purchase the DID through your callwithus account. I am buying a number located in the UK. Once you have purchased the DID you can click on the DID menu option again to check where the DID is being forwarded to. To make things easier on the FreePBX side we want to change this from the default.

If you’re using sip to connect to callwithus then you need to make sure that you’re using the generic address sip.callwithus.com as your proxy/registrar. From May 1st the other, more specific addresses, that used to work will stop accepting registrations (west.callwithus.com, east.callwithus.com, uk.callwithus.com) See here for further details – http://www.callwithus.com/configuration

When I setup my ratecard here I only created 1 rate to Leicester in the UK. Ok for testing but not much use in the real world! So how are we going to enter all of the rates we need – the answer is to import them. Many ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) publish a rate file that you can download. I’m going to use the callwithus (my provider) rate file that you can download from here.

After we’ve created a trunk we need to create a ratecard and assign it to a call plan. This is the main part of the billing application and also the most complicated! Initially I’m just going to create a ratecard that allows calls Leicester in the UK. The dialling code for Leicester is 0116 so the international prefix would be 44116 (44 being for the UK) Creating a Ratecard First click on the RATECARD menu on the left hand side of the screen Then give your ratecard a name. I called mine “test-rate-card” Assign the ratecard to use the trunk…

In this series of articles I’m going to run through how to get up your a2billing system up and running. A2billing is an opensource billing application for Asterisk and can be used in many different ways – I’ll be documenting just some examples 🙂 Some of this setup will depend how you have your main configuration file (/etc/asterisk/a2billing.conf) configured. I will not be discussing that here. Also some of the setup may rely on FreePBX and A2billing being setup to work together. All of this documentation was created on a sysadminman Asterisk/FreePBX/A2billing VPS. See here for details – http://sysadminman.net/uk-voip-vps.html Setting…

This article assumes you have completed part 1 and part 2 So we have configured our trunk and our extension and now we need to tell FreePBX to use that trunk when someone dials a number. This is done by creating an Outbound Route. The configuration below also takes in to consideration the fact that I am in the UK and that callcentric is a US company. Your setup may differ. Creating an outbound route First we need to click on “Outbound Routes” in the main menu on the left hand side of the screen

In this series of articles I will run through how to get started once you get FreePBX setup. You will need to run through the articles in order as some of the later ones will rely on items set up in earlier articles. For a trunk (required to make calls to the outside world) I will use callwithus. Click here for a free account. Adding a trunk The main FreePBX menu is down the left hand side of the screen Click Trunks

*** UPDATE 23/6/09 – While callwithus still have a UK sip server you should use the server ‘sip.callwithus.com’ in your configuration settings. Check the callwithus website for details. If you’re based in the UK or Europe and looking for a cheap ITSP (VIOP provider) it might be worth looking at CallWithUS as they’ve recently launched a UK based SIP server. As well as the US based servers sip.callwithus.com, east.callwithus.com and west.callwithus.com you can now use uk.callwithus.com. I now get sub 6ms pings from my Asterisk server in BlueSquare to the CallWithUs server. I’ve been using CallWithUs for a while now…

The instructions below assume that you have got Asterisk, FreePBX and A2Billing installed and working together. Below are the first steps in setting up a callwithis DID number and passing the call through to A2Billing. This number can then be used as an access number for your calling card clients. Once you’ve signed up for your callwithus account and purchased your DID number the next thing you want to do is modify how your DID number gets presented to your Asterisk box so you can route it to a2billing. On the callwithus website, click on DID on the left hand…